A Sense of Community on the Appalachian Trail and Camino de Santiago

“Hey man, is there any way you can come hike with me on the Appalachian Trail?” I anxiously asked all my close friends.

“No, I’ve gotta’ work,” was the response I invariably received.

“Well, how bout’ just going for a week or two,” I virtually pleaded with most of them.

I was distraught. Fortunately the story has a happy ending. For the minute I stepped foot onto America’s most popular footpath, it became clear that the Appalachian Trail Community runs wide and deep. Approximately 3,000,000 hikers per year hike some part of it each year. Amongst that three million are approximately 2,000 thru-hikers. These are people attempting to hike the entire 2,181 mile trail from Georgia to Mount Katahdin in northern Maine in one hiking season. Thru-hikers usually begin their hikes in late March or early April. Anybody beginning in that time frame is virtually assured of being in the midst of a ‘bubble’ of hikers for the entire fourteen states.

Appalachian Trail hikers give each other trail names. Mine was Skywalker, due to my near 7-foot (2.10 meters) height.There were plenty of other colorful trail names, such as Luna (walks at night under the moon), Chainsaw (snores loud), and Wrongway (gets lost a lot). These trail names help establish hiker’s identities, and are much easier to remember than regular names.

The Appalachian Trail has 255 shelters, which is an average of one shelter every nine miles (15 kilometers). These three-sided shelters are popular sites for camping, cooking dinner, getting water, and socializing. I found that even on days when I was hiking alone, I could look forward to having company that evening at the shelter. In fact, this tight-knit social community makes the hiker feel like he or she is part of something larger than himself or herself. In my case, it even served as an impetus to keep going on low-morale days, and ultimately helped me complete my thru-hike.

Community on the Camino

The biggest problem with most foreign trips is meeting people. Usually foreign tourists are limited to formal conversations with restaurant waiters, hotel desk clerks, bellhops, etc. While walking through the streets in foreign countries, tourists habitually do ample sightseeing and make lots of eye contact with strangers. But deeper penetration into the culture usually proves elusive. The good news is that the Camino de Santiago is a dramatic departure from such a traditional overseas trip.

Pilgrims are forced out of their comfort zone. The routine requires it. On an average day on the Camino Frances, a pilgrim walks 25 kilometers, including climbs and descents, while carrying a backpack. That, in and of itself, loosens up most people.

“How do you decide who to walk with on the Camino?” is the perennial question people ask before walking the Camino de Santiago. Usually, the answer is very simple. Pilgrims walk with other pilgrims who go about their speed. Almost by default this creates kindred souls. In fact, it can create the oddest hiking partners. I vividly remember a pair of widowed septuagenarian males walking almost the entire Camino Frances with two Scandinavian college students. Better yet, they reveled in having pilgrim dinners and red wine, often followed by dancing in the evenings.

Pilgrims stay busy—much more so than other tourists. They are constantly preoccupied with existential pilgrimage questions such as how far to walk for the day, which albergue to stay in, where to eat dinner, whether to do laundry, choosing bunks, and occasionally bothersome pilgrims. The good news is that this full agenda forces people to ‘let their masks down’. It is much easier to develop authentic relationships on the Camino than almost any other type trip. In the Information Age, cell phones, computers, and other electronic gadgets habitually get in the way of establishing authentic relationships. Studies consistently point up the irony that despite the fact that we are more interconnected than ever, people now have less than half the close friends that people did just thirty years ago. But Camino-style travel takes dead aim at this. You can spend just a few days—sometimes mere hours—struggling along the Camino with other pilgrims and already feel genuinely close to them.

A great irony is in the making. In the Middle Ages, 500,000 pilgrims, mostly indigent and illiterate, walked the Camino de Santiago. Now in the much more affluent 21st century, medieval ‘camino-style’ traveling is making a comeback. The stark fact is that large numbers of overseas tourists have found packaged, sedentary travel packages to be sterile. The one, and only one, change I would make in the Camino culture is to institute the convention of ‘pilgrim names’ (‘walking names’), as is the custom on the Appalachian Trail. This adds an element of excitement and surprise in the early part of the journey. Better yet, given the nature of the journey and far-flung origins of the pilgrims walking it, some of the names would likely be quite vivid. And in a practical sense, pilgrim names would be easier to remember.

Perhaps the stunning resurgence of the Camino de Santiago lies in the wisdom espoused by St. Augustine way back in the first century. “Solvitur ambulando (Walking solves all).”

Like this:

Related

Comments

Funny that you mention the concept of “camino names,” as we ended up creating nicknames for each other on my camino. I was “superman,” not due to any great feat of strength, but rather because of the extra red rain cover that I stretched from my neck over the top of my pack to keep water from running down my back. Apparently it looked like a cape?

I’m just back from a two week 266km hike on the Camino. We were three friends who started the journey together and I was the only one who more or less completed the distance we set out to do. The Camino has a habit of throwing things at you and you have to cope as best you can. I would not change this experience for all the money in the world and I’m very much looking forward to walking the next 266km’s in May 2013, GOD willing..

I have to mention nicknames though…My friend Albert, a sturdy fellow, started his walk with a pack weighing near enough 20kg’s! He had a full bottle of sjampoo and another of shower gell with him…all because the sjampoo smellt nice. Needless to say, he got very blistered feet and a a nickname to boot! You guessed it…Sjampoo!

My nickname was one I was unaware off for some time. My kness gave me a lot of trouble in the second week of walking and I was walking with severe pain for most days. It wasan incredibly slow and painful process, even with painkillers and taped up knees…but I walked and the kindness and care I received astounded me and restored my faith in humanity. Anyway, I digress…with all this crawling along, I got the nickname of Braveheart, it was and still is an honour and very humbling…to carry this name means a lot to me and it will stay one of my fondest memories of the Camino….

The Appalachian trail sounds awesome and not as far to travel. Was of interest that there are shelter along the way.Can you give me more info or a web site for this trail…also have done five Camino’s and am going on June 25 to Spain for an extended Camino till August 28..about names on the trails mine was the priest and when I reach Santiago they thought I was a Monsignor.Buen Camino.

I’ve been learning Spanish for some time, but found that visits to Spanish resorts don’t not help much, since those “restaurant waiters, hotel desk clerks, bellhops, etc.” mentioned in the post above can invariably speak better English than I speak Spanish.

Admittedly, visits to Valladolid, Salamanca, and, surprisingly, Málaga, have been much more fruitful in this respect, but one of the main reasons for me tackling the Camino frances last year was to walk with Spanish speakers, hoping that we could all benefit from speaking each others’ language.

Or so I thought! Despite travelling to Spain alone, and meeting many people, whose company I really enjoyed, from all over the UK, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, and other European countries (apart from Spain), I only met two hispanohablantes, one of whom was a cyclist from Columbia (who’d only be moving at my speed if his tyres were punctured), and the other was a Mexican who lived in the USA, who, naturally, spoke far better English than I speak Spanish.

So I decided to drop out after ten days on reaching Burgos and immersed myself in the language for three weeks. I don’t regret any of it – the first ten days was really enjoyable, apart from the Spanish, and the last three weeks was great for my Spanish.

And it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t finish that camino, because I already have a certificate (somewhere) for completing the Camino portugues in 2012, and I met lots of friendly people in Burgos too (incidentally, there’s a “Drink in English” group who practice their English language skills in a bar quite near to the Cathedral on Friday nights).

But I wonder whether other peregrinos have done better than me, and managed to practice their language skills while walking the camino.

My Son and I walked the Camino this May and we ended up taking 37 days to walk and we toured an extra 8 days for a total of 45 days away from home. I am 76 years old and my son is 56 years old. It was a struggle but we made it. As a matter of fact our wives came over and met us at Sarria and they finished the walk with us. We left home on May 9 through Paris and returned home June 22 through Madrid. It was a wonderful experience but a major challenge for me. However we both made it in fine fashion. I would love to do it with all my children. It is an accomplishment of a lifetime that I would advise everyone to do. We actually met several wonderful people from all over the world. The sense of community is just great. We had many people tp pray for and we really made it a religious and spiritual event. It was a remarkable experience, especially when we finally arrived in Santiago. We live in Queensbury, NY and My Son lives in Southern Queensbury. So that in itself was a challenge. Been Camino!

Privacy Information

Disclaimer

CaminoAdventures.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.